Friday, November 24, 2017

The Global Croplands Map

The USGS has released an interactive map which shows all the land used for crops and all the possible cropland in the world. As the world's population continues to grow the USGS believes that monitoring global croplands and their water use is essential to ensure future food security.

The Global Croplands map provides 30 meter resolution cropland data for the entire world. The data comes from analyzing Landsat satellite data using the Google Earth Engine cloud computing platform. Europe, India, the USA, China and Russia have the highest cropland areas and combined have about half of the world's cropland.

The 30-m global cropland data used in the Global Cropland map is currently in the peer-review stage. Once this peer review process is over the data will be released and available to download.